Monthly Archives: April 2016

Many of my students who come to my blog as the first step of accessing the handouts for their class have no idea just how much other content is in the blog itself and its pages. Hopefully this post, which includes a video, tour will help them find the additional digital photography information contained here.

Below is a quick video tour of my blog and its pages.

I have had my blog now for over four years, so there is a wealth if information that, which I hope will be of interest and useful to you. The video shows where you can search for a title topic, and I have put together a list of all of my posts for the last couple of years. This list is at the link below. It is an Excel spreadsheet. Once you open the file, you can click on its title and go immediately to that post in my blog. Your browser may ask you whether or not you want to open the file or save it. Just follow its prompts.

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About a week ago Google made its complete Nik Collection suite of plug-ins for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements available as a free download. In an earlier postI explained what was in the collection and where to download it.

In my last post on this subject, I illustrated how the Dfine 2 plug-incan be easily used to reduce the noise that results when an image is captured using an extremely high ISO.

This time, we take a very brief look at what Nik Color Efex Pro 4 can do. It has so many presets and effects that there is no way to do it justice in one short blog post. So instead, I’ll just illustrate what I did to pretty overexposed image. I chose to use Photoshop Elements 14 for this post, but earlier versions of Elements, and of course Photoshop could be used as well.

First, I added one of the image Border presets in Color Efex Pro 4.

Then I added one of the Color Efex Pro 4 Tonal Contrast presets.

At that point,I added a traditional Brightness/Contrast Adjustment Layer.

I then merged these layers into a composite layer using Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E.

Finally, I applied the auto profile setting of Dfine 2, since the adjustments I was adding to this small JPEG image were beginning to take its toll.

Shown below is the layer stack I ended up with.

A couple points are worth noting here. First I had set the Options in Color Efex Pro 4 to apply each effect on its own layer. Among other things, this allowed me to tweak the impact of the effect by adjusting the Opacity of the layer. Also, note that you can intermingle Color EfexPro 4 layers with layers dealing with Photoshop Elements commands. Think of the multitude of presets embedded in Color Efex Pro 4 as starting points for you to adjust to create your own vision of the captured scene.

The figure below compares my before and after for this simple example.

I hope you found this post helpful. If so, click on the Like and share it with others using the buttons below. Also, let me know what you think of the Nik Collection in the comments below.

Using the Folder View in Photoshop Elements can really help you manage the physical locations where you store your pictures and videos. Using the commands within the Folder View, you can do disk housekeeping without leaving the Organizer. This helps you avoid breaking the Cardinal Rules for using the Organizer: Once the you have imported a picture into the Catalog, you must not move it, rename it, or delete it, unless you do it using the applicable command within the Organizer. Otherwise you will disconnect it in the Organizer.

Using the Folder View expands upon those commands you find under the Menu bar. The video below demonstrates its use.

If you found this helpful, and would like to see more videos, click on the Like button below as well as on YouTube.